All posts tagged lifestyle blog

This blog is not one of those lifestyle blogs, full of carefully styled photographs, written by a blogger who cultivates a persona that is allegedly busy and a little bit frazzled, but ultimately always upbeat, optimistic, and able to be cheered up instantly a cliched saying, typeset over a picture of a kitten.

In the ancient past, I did try to be an artist for a while, but in the tradition of the fine-art type artist, ie, one who makes their work according to where their own research and ideas lead them, not driven by commercial incentives. Unfortunately that approach incurs expenses and does not bring in much income to begin with, (just ask Vincent Van Gogh!) and thus, was hard to maintain and justify after a while, so I moved on.

Unfortunately, perhaps, I am NOT one of those people who has managed to combine their creativity with a strong entrepreneurial streak and turn it into a business, and I don’t necessarily want to. I’ve found I’m quite satisfied by earning my income working in creative companies with strong social justice agendas, doing the practical work to keep them running. This blog, therefore, is my creative outlet.

So you won’t read here about me juggling my own hard-but-rewarding business as a stylist/fashion designer and photographer with my sideline as a meditation and yoga teacher, while also just having published my very first self-help book, or how I managed all of this while mothering a brood of highly photogenic children that look amazing in pastel-coloured clothes in front of pastel-coloured backdrops in the photos that I so carefully style.

If you like reading that kind of thing, please feel free to depart from here now, because that’s not this blog! I never wear white flowing clothes, drink green smoothies, or voluntarily rise before 7.30am, and my kitchen never looks like a display home, except that it has a permanent display of dirty dishes next to the sink because I can never wash them fast enough to keep up with people who apparently drink 37 glasses of water a day, each from a clean glass.

On this blog you are more likely to read the stream-of-consciousness of someone who spends a lot of time thinking about writing, while juggling boring mundane things like grocery shopping, running errands, washing dishes, hanging out laundry and cleaning the shower. Even more frustratingly, none of those activities suggest a particularly interesting photo opportunity, but perhaps that’s just evidence that I’m not being creative enough. Suggestions for how to style photos of the above are welcome.

Here comes a stream-of -consiousness now: There are many of us out there scratching away (scratching is an analogy that doesn’t really work now that we’ve moved on from pen-and-ink to computers, and just makes it sound as if we all have fleas). After writing this blog for about eight years, it’s hard to maintain interest in it, because I feel as if I should be moving on and trying to write something more challenging. Are others still reading blogs? It’s hard to know. Despite the supposed number of people following this blog, the number of readers has never risen much over a few handfuls of people per day, from the time it began.

For those of us who enjoy writing, it can be a consuming hobby. Never does time go by so quickly as when I sit down to write. Why, already it’s after lunch time and I haven’t eaten any, nor do I have anything to make lunch with. But who cares to consider such practicalities when one’s head is in the abstract world of ideas, and absorbed in trying to craft a paragraph that’s meant to be poetically written and meaningful. (*that is not referring to any of the paragraphs in this post, by the way.) It’s a shame that often I delete the whole paragraph the next day when I re-read it and discover that it’s pedestrian, badly-written, and idiotic.

Anyway.

Another thing this blog is not, is an inspiration to others. You won’t read this blog and be inspired to clean your house, that’s for sure. In fact, many people who visit my house and simply don’t realise how much hard work and time is spent on drafting, deleted and re-writing posts for this very blog, probably think I’m lazy. That’s because there is dust on the stairs, laundry piled up in both laundry baskets waiting to be folded, and weeds growing larger by the second in the garden, but I’ll be serenely sitting upstairs staring into a laptop screen, doing what a lot of people would call nothing. That is, thinking, reading and writing, with no financial incentive for that work. Madness.

Those of you who read this blog know better, of course, because you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t value time spent in creative pursuits, like thinking, reading, and writing.

I like to think that I’m not lazy, it’s that I’m unwilling to re-prioritise.